Thanks for the clarification. It is true that the secret operations of destabilization of states are more documented for the USA. Maybe it's also because they do it more...? After all, this country has the biggest military budget in the world.
After, far be it from me to think that China (probably the worst model of control with the social credit - like Black Mirror, a hybrid mixing the worst of communism and liberalism) or Russia (responsible for poisoning or disappearance of opponents) are angels. They are dictatorships.
On the other hand, when I was a child, I naively believed in the image sold by the media, movies, music, that the USA was the Land of the Free, the good guys against the bad guys, the heroes who saved the world. But the truth is quite different. I really understood it when after 9/11, Bush went to look for the people responsible for the attacks in...Iraq. Even though the real perpetrators were known. This war destabilized the whole region. Of course, other countries took advantage of it, the United Kingdom (Tony Blair) even invented false evidence of weapons of mass destruction. Then France in Libya (the French president had a debt to Gaddafi), ...
But, under the guise of bringing "democracy" to a country, the USA is waging war all over the world. Foments revolutions (the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, etc.) and disrupts the things for its own profit.
I don't have proof of this as such (as it would be very hard to quantify) but I'm reasonably sure that it is at the very least a toss-up between the US and the USSR in terms of what the Washington would call "promoting democracy" and the Kremlin, more obliquely,
aktivne meropriyatiya. Toss in on the US side stuff like working under the cover of USAID or even the active promotion of Abstract Impressionism in the art world (really) and for the Soviets, subversion of the World Council of Churches and the peace and antinuclear movements both stateside and worldwide. It truly was a hall of mirrors on a level that is just incomprehensible to people today, let alone young people who didn't specifically study it. I am just old enough to remember Soviet nukes on parade and the mood they provoked in my parents and in the country as a whole and even though my school studies didn't focus on the USSR and Cold War as such (or Europe or the Americas) this stuff was nonetheless required reading as it had it's fallout
everywhere.
Unfortunately both during and after the Cold War there is a tendency in primarily leftist but also non-interventionist right circles to view US intervention in the world as a sort of boogeyman
sui generis, but this is extremely unfair and it is a particularly fabulist sort of self-hatred that denigrates the US to the level of the USSR in terms of overall fuckery or even objective metaphysical evil. This stuff made its way into the historical canon by way of the activism of a variety of groups, many of whom were decidedly radical if not outright Communist adjacent (this actually continues to this day, the tiny neo-Marxist groupuscule and personality cult of the Revolutionary Communist Party, due to the superior organizing skills and free time of its members, has an outsize role in organizing antiwar marches and the like, this was perhaps most notable during the presidency of George W. Bush) as well as the work of revisionist agitprop historians such as Howard Zinn, who always denied membership in the CPUSA but was in fact quite active in the 50's (something which only came out with the declassification of, if I'm remembering this right, the FBI files of
some other people, while his is still under seal. The CPUSA, especially in those days, adhered to the Soviet party line in the most slavish possible way.)
As an example, the celebrated spy cases of Alger Hiss and the Rosenbergs were much-publicized and generally memed up in leftist circles for decades as examples of statist hysteria attacking innocent leftists as traitors. The left in the US, even eventually elements of the mainstream left, really went all in on this. Unfortunately, after the Cold War, documents came to light to show that the US authorities were in the right after all. As really is typical, they just shut up about it rather than actually reevaluate anything.
That the US has the largest military budget may be true
now, but we were routinely outspent, especially in %GDP terms but in fact outright, by the Rooskies, especially during the tensest years of the 1980s. When you include intelligence agencies in these estimates things get murkier and the situation with regards to the USSR is even more opaque and even the bests Kremlinologists can only argue amongst themselves with regards to USSR military/security spending in general. As for the relative success of "active measures" (as I believe the Russians called them even now), well, one need only look at the end results, with particular attention to the special
Schadenfreude of giving the Russians their "own Vietnam" in Afghanistan (where of course we ourselves went less than a generation later, but I digress.) But the USSR was probably active in more interventions in terms of total count than the US (just about every guerilla group in the world, even ones that weren't even Communist, could feed at the Russian trough) but were more active than even
that and on just about every corner of every continent, the domestic US not excepted.
South America was of course a particularly fruitful area where the sequelae of Kremlin intervention remain to this today, as with Africa. The USSR essentially considered itself to have an absolute right to intervene in its "backyard" of Eastern Europe, and actively funded Communist activities in Western Europe, not at all to the exclusion of outright terrorism, see Germany's (Baader-Meinhof)
Rote Armee Fraktion and Italy's
Brigate Rosso as the most prominent examples, and the activities of the latter were very close to happening in the context of a low-intensity war (the evocatively-named
anna de piomo or "years of lead") which featured involvement by spooks of all shades in a country that was for decades perilously close to having a (Soviet-backed) Communist government. The CIA even prepared weapons caches ("Operation Gladio") against this eventuality. But even small groups in those days, if they could find their way discretely to the Russian embassy and prove themselves, could get all sorts of cool weapons (e.g. plastic explosives, RPGs and the ubiquitous AK-47) and training (which often happened in the Middle East), part of the reason why these weapons
remain ubiquitous in terrorism and low-intensity conflict the world over.
So it is decidedly
not true that our intelligence agencies were somehow more guilty of adventurism than the Soviets, but it is quite arguably true that we were better at it, especially considering the results (and the poor results that the KGB was met with are part of the reason the world is part of why weak tin-pot governments and an excess of AK-47s can be found on every continent.) As for whether or not this is a good thing, the Cold War was completely existential. The antinuclear and peace movements (wittingly or for the larger portion of their membership unwittingly KGB-funded) had an attitude essentially
a la Rodney King ("can't we all just get along?") writ large, having ingratiated themselves with left-liberalism generally in the US, which generally controls much of our coastal elite intellectual discourse and writes our textbooks, are the collective authors of a perspective which claims that it wasn't, and, abusing Fukuyama ("The End of History"), some go further than this and argue that the Soviet Union would have burned itself out around the turn of the century otherwise, producing various cute line-graphs and the like to further the argument.
This is an easy sort of revisionism to fall into especially if one is fond, as this left-liberal group is generally, of a sort of smug moral superiority. It is easy to condemn interventionism especially when it results in frank horrors such as those perpetuated by the likes of Pinochet. Such results, of course, as means, should be condemned unequivocally and I don't mean to invoke a strictly consequentialist view here, but the fact is that without an outright invasion and occupation, the only way to intervene in, and counter the interventions of another power in, a third State is to engage with sympathetic (or merely malleable) forces within that third State. The unfortunate fact of life, though, is that those forces will often represent the very worst tendencies in that society. In the Latin world that is usually a repressive
caudillismo, and in other parts of the Global South, tribalism and sectarianism (although in the Arab world, Baathism and Nasserism, both of which had a complex relationship with the two great powers, represent a refutation of both of the latter with a tendency towards the former.) Hence we arrive by unfortunate necessity at a government with an abysmal human rights record a Pinochet at the head of it all, or in generational struggles of mutual atrocity as in Nicaragua or Colombia. Of course, both sides, particularly whichever is out of power, have a tendency to deeply politicize the issue of human rights to the extent that one wants to throw up one's hands and cry out "both sides!"
There are no easy answers here, especially from the perspective of those countries which constitute the black and white squares of the Great Game chessboard. But the truth is that the Soviet Union was such an existential evil that, while fighting them entailed the abetment if not the outright perpetration of many deplorable acts, at some point one has to say, paraphrasing Churchill, that if the Soviets invaded Hell, the Devil warrants at least a "favorable reference." The extent of the evils perpetrated by the USSR, and the inherent evil of Communism, have been downplayed for decades by certain "useful idiots" (as Lenin described the Westerners who would write home rapturously about the Soviet revolution) and outright bad actors, and now, they those evils are beginning to fade from memory. This is nothing less than a crime against truth. The Soviet Union represented an unprecedented and as yet unparalleled threat. Nothing we face today comes close, not even China and certainly not Islamist terror (as the post-9/11 political consensus would imply or outright state at times.)
Post-Cold War interventionism, though, is much less excusable, even less explicable. Sometimes it often feels like we are doing it by mere reflex, or that we are on a great warship that is hard to turn around. The interventionist "neoconservatives" (a term which has long since past it's original meaning and even become merely a term of abuse) have various motivations to involve themselves in the Middle East and Third World countries which are beyond our scope here. Interventions directed at Russia (such as in the Ukraine) seem to be perpetrated because this is the default. The Russians, as a people and as a nation, after the fall of Communism, are not our natural geopolitical enemies (although they are quite different from us in culture and mentality, much more so than Western Europe) and Putin is mostly preoccupied domestically and with the former Soviet sphere. Our genuine geopolitical enemy these days is China, and their methods of exerting influence on an international-relations level are markedly different from those of the Soviets and are, among other things, of a much less overtly violent nature, as our response must therefore be. This, of course, involves redirecting the ship of state, which—and this is hard for the ordinary patriotic but politically naïve American to accept—involves a lot more than electing the "correct" people. Our national energies as a whole need to be redirected, but this is a generational project. Most of our adventures after 1991 were mistakes, something that only of late we are beginning to integrate. The next few decades surely will be "interesting times" (which is actually
not an ancient Chinese curse, but since it has entered the popular consciousness as such, it seems the appropriate term to use.)
Fini. I can take a breath now. I still owe CEPS an essay or two on transgenderism though.
And for that matter (
@Xorkoth) this and the other Allende stuff could move there if people want it to.
sux for us tho
to each his own.
